The Parent’s Guide To Successful Homeschooling

Rule #5: It is like the old saying goes, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. Expensive does not necessarily mean better. There are $250 reading programs that are loaded with praise and there are those reading programs that cost a mere $25 that are far better. Any dedicated teacher with a good phonics program can teach a child to read and spell well.

You need to remember, this is homeschooling. Some of our favorite programs look like they were put together on someone’s kitchen table at night rather than something that was meticulously written by a professor. We’ve been so conditioned as consumers to want slick packages that we will judge the quality of a product by how it is packaged rather than what is inside of it. Don’t make this mistake.

This guide is not meant to be the one and only way to develop a lesson plan; however it is going to provide you with at least some good methods to start with. It is a general overview that highlights the key points of creating a useful and working lesson plan.

Below is a list of the steps that are usually involved in developing a quality lesson plan as well as a description of what each component should be. They will be listed in 10 of the best points.

4. You may also want to write out an Anticipatory Set, which would be a great way to lead into the lesson plan and develop the students’ interest in learning what you are getting ready to teach. A good example deals with a lesson on fractions. The teacher could start by asking the students how they would divide up a pizza to make sure each of their 3 friends got an equal amount of pie, and tell them that they can do this if they know how to work with fractions.

TOPIC: Addition and Subtraction
GRADE LEVEL: 3 – 5
TITLE: Cross Out Singles

Materials you will need: Partner or small group
One dice or a 0 – 9 spinner

ACTIVITY:
1. Each player has to make a recording sheet, for a game that consists of three rounds.

2. To begin, one player rolls the die or spins the spinner.

3. All players will now write the number that comes up in a square on their first chart. Once a number is marked down, it cannot be changed.

Title – Hurricanes – Florida
By – Carolyn Murray
Subject – Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, Other
Grade Level – 4-5

CONTENT:

The lesson plan that you will make on hurricanes is meant to teach students the many different concepts that exist about hurricanes, which is an important part of Florida’s past and future. This lesson is also intended to be taught for a full week. Students will be able to use this lesson plan to make connections, understand the key concepts and be able to keep the knowledge that was presented to them for them to use as needed in the future.

It is possible that the biggest hardship that a homeschooling parent faces is how to make a schedule for homeschooling. I’ve heard many ideas from many parents about how they handle the scheduling issue. Some use software programs and some write every thing in a notebook or they use a program like Microsoft Word.

Some of them plan the day as it goes and some plan ahead of time. I prefer to think that it is a mixture of planning ahead and on-the-spot is the most comfortable and practical when it comes to homeschooling.

What your Goals Should be:

The fact of the matter is that some things shouldn’t be scheduled too far in advance. Math, for one, should not be planned too far ahead. Fortunately, there’s no problem with scheduling math, because almost all math curriculums are pretty much laid out for you in your math kits.

If your child did lesson one yesterday, then today your child will do lesson two, unless your child had a problem with lesson one and needs a review. This is why you should not schedule math far in advance. Math is always a harder subject to learn and therefore can’t be pre-planned.

You will want to plan grammar the way you would plan math; meaning a little at a time, perhaps a week or two ahead and in pencil. Some grammar programs are easy to plan for, whereas others are not. Daily Grams, for example has 180 lessons in it.

You can take up to two years to complete a Daily Grams book or you can do a lesson a day and complete it in one school year. Easy Grammar lessons usually take around two years to complete.

Spelling books are most commonly laid out for you and all your child will do is a lesson a day for four days and then he/she will do a test on the 5th day. If you use Natural Speller or Spelling Power, you will need to make plans for the spelling lessons.

You’ll need to decide which word list you want to use and what activities that you want your child to do each day. Once a week you will need to make detailed lesson plans for the upcoming week. I think Spelling Power has the tools you need to teach spelling and it is more structured. You have to make a decision on the structure and how to go about creating the lessons.

Studying words is a very good use of your child’s time. There are many excellent curriculums that will make this easy for you. Wordly Wise is one of those that I would personally recommend. However, you can do this without curriculum. If you have a very good dictionary like the dictionary tells the parts of speech, the pronunciation, the syllables, the antonyms, the root words, and of course, a definition and example sentence for every part of speech that each word has.